December 5: Kenney’s first year | Joe DeFelice Q&A | Street’s portrait

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This morning NPR reports that Dr. Ben Carson is officially Donald Trump’s pick to run his Department of Housing and Urban Development. Carson is an accomplished neurosurgeon but lacks any government experience, and is seen as an “unorthodox” choice for the position. Last month The Hill reported that Carson initially turned the position down. Yet, Carson said on Fox News recently that his experience growing up in Detroit would help give him perspective. He went on to say that “we cannot have a strong nation if we have weak inner cities.” 

How has Jim Kenney’s first year as mayor gone? Holly Otterbein looks back at Kenney, the absolute insider in a year of outsider victories and wonders if he can demonstrate that there’s value in old school politics that value experience and the work of compromise, with Council, with labor, with constituents, toward common ends.

Joe DeFelice, head of Philadelphia’s Republican Party, shared his views with Holly Otterbein on how the media got president-elect Donald Trump’s support so wrong, a testy exchange over hate crimes and Trump’s conflicts of interest, and how the GOP can hold onto blue-collar voters by reassessing Republican policies that work against their interests.

Tom MacDonald explains why Mayor John Street’s portrait hasn’t ever been hung in City Hall’s Mayor’s Reception Room: an enduring beef between Mayors Street and Michael Nutter.

This week, Inga Saffron turns her eye to Esslinger’s, a brewery turned industrial chemical manufacturer at the intersection of Ridge Avenue at 10th and Callowhill streets.

Hidden City Daily has a peek into the closed SEPTA concourses of Center City.

On Saturday roughly 2,700 people in Center City were without power due to a reported explosion inside PECO’s Juniper Street substation, triggering fire-suppressing foam to flood the building and the block.